Blog Post:As part of our commitment to best-in-class mobile reporting, we’ve recently developed offline measurement for iOS, Android and Blackberry. This feature increases the accuracy and completeness of your data, especially in areas with intermittent or no connectivity, such as subway commutes and airline travel.
The beta versions of AppMeasurement for iOS, Android and Blackberry are available now. If you’d like to participate in the current AppMeasurement beta, ask your account manager to add you to the beta program for "Offline AppMeasurement" or add a comment to the bottom of this post and our beta program manager will reach out to you directly.
Here’s how offline measurement works. You configure AppMeasurement to record while offline, usually a dead simple process. When a user’s phone is disconnected from the web, any data you try to send is queued up on the phone. When the device is back online, the cache of hits are sent to our collection servers, and data collection continues as normal.
What if my app has little or no offline capabilities?
Even if your app has no offline functionality, you still benefit. Users of your app often jump between connectivity states—this enhancement will improve reporting accuracy during those transition periods. However, there's a more important question which you can now answer, "Should I improve the offline experience for my app?"
To answer this question, simply set a variable with the offline/online state of each hit. Then analyze the percentage of your app visits or visitors that experience an offline event during their app usage. Lastly, weigh the required investment against the percentage of users who use the app while offline. As you can see from the screenshot below, 13% of app users went offline during the month—if this were a real app, you should consider adding offline functionality to improve the user experience.
My app already has offline functionality. Where should I start optimizing?
If your app already has offline functionality, set a variable with the offline status as mentioned above. Then start your analysis by looking at the most popular content by offline status. There are several ways to do this (a sample screenshot has been provided below). You can then fine-tune your offline functionality to favorably impact your key performance indicators.
If you haven’t participated in our beta programs before, this is a great time to start. Beta participants not only get early access to upcoming features, they also help shape how those features turn out, provide direct input to the product development team, and get some incredible beta participation gifts. Okay…so incredible may be a stretch for the gift, unless you count regular phone calls with me a gift.
Our esteemed Ed Hewett, who many of you know and love, contributed to this post.
Author:Bret Gundersen
Date Created:September 22, 2010
Headline:When Apps Go Underground: Announcing Offline Support for Mobile
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Publisher:Adobe

When Apps Go Underground: Announcing Offline Support for Mobile

As part of our commitment to best-in-class mobile reporting, we’ve recently developed offline measurement for iOS, Android and Blackberry. This feature increases the accuracy and completeness of your data, especially in areas with intermittent or no connectivity, such as subway commutes and airline travel.

The beta versions of AppMeasurement for iOS, Android and Blackberry are available now. If you’d like to participate in the current AppMeasurement beta, ask your account manager to add you to the beta program for “Offline AppMeasurement” or add a comment to the bottom of this post and our beta program manager will reach out to you directly.

Here’s how offline measurement works. You configure AppMeasurement to record while offline, usually a dead simple process. When a user’s phone is disconnected from the web, any data you try to send is queued up on the phone. When the device is back online, the cache of hits are sent to our collection servers, and data collection continues as normal.

What if my app has little or no offline capabilities?

Even if your app has no offline functionality, you still benefit. Users of your app often jump between connectivity states—this enhancement will improve reporting accuracy during those transition periods. However, there’s a more important question which you can now answer, “Should I improve the offline experience for my app?”

To answer this question, simply set a variable with the offline/online state of each hit. Then analyze the percentage of your app visits or visitors that experience an offline event during their app usage. Lastly, weigh the required investment against the percentage of users who use the app while offline. As you can see from the screenshot below, 13% of app users went offline during the month—if this were a real app, you should consider adding offline functionality to improve the user experience.

My app already has offline functionality. Where should I start optimizing?

If your app already has offline functionality, set a variable with the offline status as mentioned above. Then start your analysis by looking at the most popular content by offline status. There are several ways to do this (a sample screenshot has been provided below). You can then fine-tune your offline functionality to favorably impact your key performance indicators.

If you haven’t participated in our beta programs before, this is a great time to start. Beta participants not only get early access to upcoming features, they also help shape how those features turn out, provide direct input to the product development team, and get some incredible beta participation gifts. Okay…so incredible may be a stretch for the gift, unless you count regular phone calls with me a gift.

Our esteemed Ed Hewett, who many of you know and love, contributed to this post.

Bret Gundersen

Bret Gundersen is an expert in Digital Analytics and has been working in the field for the last 10 years. Bret is the Group Product Manager for the Adobe Analytics data management team. He’s been involved in every major release of Adobe Analytics for the last 7 years. Bret has worked with hundreds of the world’s top companies to ensure Adobe Analytics is solving the most important problems facing marketing and analytics.

I don't see any recent posts. Interested to know how the beta is progressing. We have several mobile apps and are developing more. We also have Omniture on our corporate website. We are looking for ways to aggregate usage data and content downloads/views across mobile and traditional web browsers. Would appreciate any current information. Thanks

Offline mobile measurement is available to everyone in the Admin Console. You can download AppMeasurement for iOS, Android or Blackberry, and you’ll have the ability to measure while the phone is offline.

Prateek,
If you use a standard HTTP GET request to send data, you can use the query parameter 'ts' to indicate the timestamp. Don't forget to have ClientCare configure your report suite to accept timestamped data.
For what it's worth, companies using our AppMeasurement libraries find them much easier to maintain than formatting URL query parameters. You may save development time by making that switch. For example, in this case, you'll have to build your own queuing mechanism, which we've done for you in the AppMeasurement libraries.
Either way, the answer is yes, you can track offline no matter how you send us the data.

Claudio, Elena and Chris,
Good news! Offline mobile measurement is now available to everyone in the Admin Console. You can download AppMeasurement for iOS, Android or Blackberry, and you'll have the ability to measure while the phone is offline.

Cool use case, James. While we built this functionality for mobile apps, the functionality also exists in AppMeasurement for Java and is planned for AppMeasurement for Flash and AIR. If any of your Kiosks are using Java and you'd like to try it out, just say so.

Bret,
This is very interesting. Question - can this approach be used for measurement of 'other' offline applications? We're currently building http based applications for Kiosks and Desktop AIR apps that are offline most of the time, but will connect to the server upon request - for example a sales enablement tool built in flash, and exposed using AIR that a sales rep can use to demo a tool/service while with a client without requiring internet connection. Once the sales rep returns to the office it will connect and download latest materials.
We've been track usage of such apps using basic log reporting while offline to a local cache that is later uploaded to a server - a more elegant solution would be great!
J